The Illusion of Polish

What happens when a piece of work looks finished, polished and authoritative — but nobody has questioned the thinking behind it? That's the question at the heart of Tim Burnett's latest conversation on the Test Community Network podcast, recorded ahead of the IAEA conference in Toronto with fellow ambassador Gelareh Keshavarz.

Watch the conversation in full >

Gelareh is a doctoral candidate, educator and change management professional based in Ontario. She currently serves as President of the Athabasca University Graduate Students' Association and sits on the university's Board of Governors — putting her, as she puts it, at the intersection of governance, leadership and multiple levels of education at once. Her doctoral research uses interpretive phenomenological analysis to explore how generative AI is reshaping the lived experience of multilingual educators, and from that work she has developed design considerations for redesigning assessment and professional development.

"The most critical trend that I am observing, and we probably need to collectively observe, is the illusion of polish. When AI is not invited into the process of thinking, it comes out in the final work. When things look polished, finished, and authoritative, we don’t question the thinking behind them, and we accept them."
— Gelareh Keshavarz, EdD(c), President, Athabasca University Graduate Students' Association

Gelareh links this directly to what the OECD calls "cognitive laziness" — the risk of outsourcing our thinking to a machine without noticing we've done it. It's not a call to reject AI, but a call to interrogate the gap between a finished output and the reasoning that produced it.

"AI may not be an equaliser in the classroom. People who can afford it get the pro version, and people who can’t, don’t. But it might be an agent of social change for people with learning disabilities and difficulties, who can have higher aspirations when they have a tool that helps them."
— Gelareh Keshavarz, EdD(c)

This tension — between AI as a widening gap and AI as a levelling tool — runs through Gelareh's research on "hybridity", the process of AI and humans working together. She frames it as a set of questions every learner and educator should be asking themselves: where did you relinquish power, and where did you keep it? When did you use AI as a ghostwriter, and when as an interlocutor?

"I would never trust AI because it’s a technology, just as I would never trust my stove. I can cook with the stove, but it’s for me to decide what I cook."
— A research participant quoted by Gelareh Keshavarz

It's a deceptively simple image, but it reframes the trust debate entirely. Trust isn't something you place in the tool itself — it's something you place in your own judgement about how and when to use it. Gelareh applies the same logic to her own doctoral work: AI can take the lower-order thinking off her plate, but the decisions, and the ownership of them, stay firmly with her.

"What I have learned from using it is that it can take the lower-order thinking off my hands and handle the basics for me, so I can focus on my higher-order thinking. I am the boss. The decision-making is always mine."
— Gelareh Keshavarz, EdD(c)

That idea of self-directed judgement extends into what Gelareh calls "self-determined" or "heutagogical" leadership — practitioners training themselves on their own needs before policy or institutions catch up. She shares the story of a finance professor in Kenya who taught herself qualitative research methods using AI, simply because no formal professional development existed for her at her university. For Gelareh, this bottom-up capability-building is one of the defining trends the wider assessment community needs to watch.

The conversation closes on a more reflective note, with Gelareh recalling a research participant's description of "learning under the tree" — a tradition where knowledge is never bought or sold, only shared through conversation. She hopes the informal moments built into the IAEA conference, including a trip to Niagara Falls, will create exactly that kind of space: the free-flowing, in-person conversation that no article or polished presentation can quite replace.

Connect with Gelareh Keshavarz on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gelareh-keshavarz

Connect with Tim Burnett on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tburnett